From 'bench to bedside': Weill Cornell and Ithaca campus researchers collaborate

At the launch of Cornell's $4 billion campaign in October 2006 in New York City, Sandy Weill, chairman of the Weill Cornell Medical College Board of Overseers, said, "I think the most important thing about this campaign is the collaboration that we're going to have with the clinical researchers here in New York City at Weill Cornell and the basic researchers up in Ithaca." He called this collaboration "translational research." Here are three examples.

Artificial skin:

Although they work 250 miles apart, C.C. Chu, Cornell professor of fiber science and apparel design, and Roger Yurt, attending surgeon at Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC), are closely collaborating on an artificial skin project that derives from a large family of therapeutic biodegradable biomaterials recently developed in Chu's lab. Other biomaterials from the same family have been tested as drug-eluting (releasing) stents and vascular grafts for vascular diseases, hydrogels for gene therapy or to treat cancer, and even a fabric that could replace cotton swabs for collecting DNA evidence in crime scenes.

Alzheimer's research:

Watt Webb, Cornell professor of applied physics and the S.B. Eckert Professor in Engineering, is leading one of the largest efforts: an extensive group of collaborative projects involving multiphoton microscopy (MPM), a technique pioneered in his lab. The projects aim to combine MPM with medical endoscopies to provide images of tissue in situ and in real time, using microscopic fluorescence and harmonic excitation.

On another front, Webb is working with Fred Maxfield, WCMC's Israel Rogosin Professor of Biochemistry, Gunnar Gouras, associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at WCMC, and colleagues to apply MPM and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) to study protein folding and aggregation in such neurodegenerative diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. These studies, which use MPM to image brain tissue and FCS for enzyme function and molecular aggregation, could give researchers a stronger understanding of what causes these diseases and how to mitigate them.

Research on aging:

Another collaboration, the Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging (CITRA), is deeply rooted in the idea that the campuses' resources complement each other in unique ways. In CITRA's case, the resources include theoreticians and social scientists in Ithaca, research clinicians from the Division of Geriatrics and Gerontology at WCMC and researchers at the Psychiatric Division of the Cornell Institute for Geriatric Psychiatry in Westchester County.

CITRA, funded by a $1.9 million grant from the National Institute on Aging, is a broad collaboration to study issues related to aging -- and translating that research to real-world solutions for the elderly.

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